Local News

King County is suddenly looking a little younger. And more male. For more than a decade, the county’s population – like the nation’s — has been steadily aging as the boomer generation edges toward its golden years. But Census Bureau data released today show a surprising reversal in King County between 2012 and 2013. Even as the U.S. median age…

We’ve come a long way from the “Will the last person leaving Seattle –Turn out the lights” era of the 1970s. Last year, Seattle grew faster than any other major American city, according to population estimates released Thursday by the Census Bureau. From July 1, 2012 to July 1, 2013, Seattle grew by 2.8 percent — the highest rate…

Is Amazon making it tough for Seattle guys to find a date? Local technology consultant Jeff Reifman published a blog post on Monday contending just that. Reifman posits that male-dominated tech companies like Amazon are drawing a lot more young men than young women to Seattle, thereby screwing up the local dating…

You might call it a “tale of two states.” According to estimates released on Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau, King County enjoyed remarkable population growth for the year ending July 1, 2013, ranking among the top four large counties in the nation for both the rate at which it added new residents and for the…

It only took 100 years. Census data show that for the first time since 1910, Seattle is growing faster than its King County suburbs. Nobody could have guessed, back in 1910, that suburban growth would soon outpace the city’s. At that point, Seattle’s population had exploded, nearly tripling over the previous 10 years. But since then, the…

At her inauguration to the Seattle City Council, Kshama Sawant spoke of a divided Seattle — a city of “glittering fortunes” for corporations and the wealthy, but also a city in which the lives of the working poor and unemployed grow increasingly difficult.

Volta, new luxury apartments in Belltown, stands in the shadow of the low-income housing project, Bell Tower. (Photo: Gene Balk/Seattle Times)

Sawant’s speech echoed the “tale of two cities” campaign theme of another newly-elected progressive politician — New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.

While the magnitude of income inequality in New York — and especially Manhattan — is notoriously bad, you don’t hear nearly as much about it in Seattle.  So how do we compare?

Washington population in 2013 stands at 6,971,406, according to Census Bureau estimates released Monday.  Since the 2010 census, the state’s population has grown by 3.7 percent — that’s the seventh fastest rate of growth among the 50 states.

High rents in Pioneer Square: Units at the new Nolo Apartments average $2,200 per month (Photo: Nolo Apartments)

How bad is the plight of the Seattle renter?

As reported in The Seattle Times, spiking rents have forced many tenants out of their neighborhoods, or out of the city altogether.

But as dire as the rental situation is here, new data suggest that it could be much worse.   In fact, according to a commonly-used indicator of affordability, renters in Seattle are faring better than those in any other major U.S. city.

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Move over, San Francisco.

Seattle now has the highest concentration of gay-couple households among America’s large cities.

Recently-released estimates from the Census Bureau show that in 2012, 2.6 percent of Seattle households were gay couples.  That is the highest percentage among the 50 most populous cities in the United States.

San Francisco, which had held the top spot since the Census Bureau began counting same-sex couples in 2000, ranked second with 2.5 percent of all households.

It’s a sharp reversal from previous census estimates.  In 2011, San Francisco had 2.4 percent gay-couple households to Seattle’s 1.7.

We are still No. 2 to San Francisco, however, for the percentage of gay-male households.  But Seattle claimed the top city for the percentage of lesbian couples by a relatively wide margin.  With lesbian couples making up 1.2 percent of households in 2012, Seattle was the only large city to exceed 1 percent.

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New census data show that racial and ethnic minorities have grown faster than the white population in Washington since 2010.

Non-Hispanic whites declined from 72.7 percent of the state’s total population in 2010 to 71.6 percent in 2012, according to the census.